A Passing Thought

Pandemonium broke loose one night in the quarter. Shouting and screaming rose high, spoiling for the sleepers — and they were few — a calm and untroubled slumber, over a matter of which the utmost that can be said is that it was trivial, and very trivial indeed.

One of the neighbors, a baker by trade, had charged a man to wake him at a fixed hour toward the end of every night, so that he might rise to the work he had practiced for tens of years with vigor and energy, anxious that the neighbors' bread should be ready before dawn.

Ill fortune willed that Uncle "Abu Sa'id" should surrender, on that inauspicious night, to a deep sleep. So the waker fell to pounding, now on the door, now on the window, with heavy blows... and it may be that he "overshot the mark." The neighbors were annoyed — above all those of them who sat in a noisy late-night circle, wrestling with luck and watching for deliverance through the eye of a needle — and their curses and insults poured down upon him and upon Uncle "Abu Sa'id"... and everyone who heard the uproar rose to ask and to inquire.

"Ya Allah!" Abu Sa'id sent it up three times. It came out of the depths of his soul, rending the gauze of night, to lodge in the ear a tormented, sorrowful cry, which soon mingled with the voice of the muezzin saying: Come to prayer, come to salvation.

And Abu Sa'id rose and hurried to his work as though he had heard nothing; indeed, he added not one word to what he had said, nor did he once look at any of those who leaned from doors and windows cursing and reviling.

Ya Allah! How wondrous a cry, how telling a call for succor! It drew the curtain over the people's ignorance and their madness, so that the face of generous, forbearing humanity might show itself in poor Abu Sa'id; and "Ya Allah" goes on echoing in that same place, tracing upon the still twilight a thousand signs and one, speaking with a thousand tongues and one, all of them saying: pitiable are these clamorers who rage at Abu Sa'id — nay, pitiable is the tree of life itself, toyed with by the hands of darkness among the sons of men.

My pause before the man was not long, as he pressed his steps onward until he vanished into a darkness delicate and soft as a dream, transparent as hope. Yet his last words went on ringing in my ear, their echo answering in the depths of my spirit, as though asking my opinion of what I had heard and seen; whereupon my tongue froze, and I felt that language had become finer than the sea and deeper than the waves.

Ya Allah! How does Abu Sa'id deserve those curses and that wrath from these carousing, drowsing companions, and why do they lift their voices against the man who has tended their bread with the sweat of his brow, the blood of his heart, and the pain of privation?

All this passed through my mind quicker than the smile of morning as it gazes upon musing nature to wake her from her sleep — she who a while before had been a black mass, dreadful and terrifying, and how swiftly she changed and stepped forth in a bright, alluring garment... Then the voices rose once more, and people burst into stronger screaming and fiercer shouting — even the newspaper criers and others and others besides began to vie in calling out and drawing out their shouts and cries. So I remembered Abu Sa'id and repeated it, as he had, three times: Ya Allah! And I said: perhaps all those who seek rest and call for goodness and righteousness are of the same stamp as the neighbors with whom my neighbor the baker was afflicted.

And here I raised my eyes to the sky, repeating: "O God, Thou who dwellest in the heights, forgive them not, for they have led us astray of set purpose, and done thus unto us..."